This Is My Blood: 400 Pound Monkey

Raise your hand if you're tired of the constant and bizarre belittlement of Northeast Philadelphia. Note that my hand is raised. You get it, you get it, you get it. Let's talk about something positive for once on this sorry fucking blog.

Here's something positive: There is a craft beer store ten minutes away from my house! Yes, craft beer exists even for us NEWTs! The store is called GAT Beer. The acronym stands for Grant Avenue Takeout. It is indeed on Grant Ave., right past Bustleton. It exists in a tiny strip of five or six other stores—I didn't take note of the other ones, but you can probably guess things like a nail salon and a dry cleaners and so on.

It has beer! The kind of beer that I need right now! The store was actually kind of weird. It seemed... empty? Like, it was filled with beer, but they weren't doing a whole lot with the space either. Just fridges and a few tables with higher-end beers, and that's it. The front area was screaming for something more. I know COVID would fuck this up, but, like, why not sell sandwiches and set up some tables for people to hang out and drink beers? Maybe they actually did all this before COVID hit, I dunno.

In any case, I wasn't there to hang out, I was there to build a six-pack. Let's use the five qualities of a good craft beer store that I came up with a few months ago and apply them to GAT Beer.

Is the store convenient? Yes, but only if you are exiled to the Northeast. Is the store's beer well-organized? Sure seemed like it. There was a flow from local to national to international beer, with breweries grouped together. So no issues there. Is there a wide selection? Maybe there's a tiny bit less of a selection than IGA, but honestly, when you consider the fact that IGA's stock consisted of like 80% IPAs, then maybe they are neck and neck. I was able to find a few interesting beers for my purchase that I had never seen before. Is it comfortable selecting your beers? Sure. I got there early in the business day, so maybe it was a because of that, but the store was empty, and the cashier was totally cool with me walking back and forth like twelve times.

And finally, is it fairly priced? Mostly yes, occasionally no, but the yeses cancel out the nos easily. All of the beers were affixed with a price label, which is convenient and helpful, and so I was able to see that most (maybe 75%) of the beers were under $3. This is good. This is really good. I can't remember any of the other craft beer stores with many sub-$3 beers at all. The weird part is that there were also wildly expensive beers, and nothing in between, so even if I was in the mood to spend money on something a little more expensive than $2.75, I literally wouldn't be able to. An example shelf would go $2.75, $2.65, $2.65, $2.85, $20.00, $2.35. I'm not making this up. If I hadn't seen that decimal point I would've paid $20 for a fucking 12 oz. imperial pumpkin ale. But it's almost a moot point, because it's really easy to just not buy something expensive when there are so many selections of fair-priced beers.

So if we're giving a point for each category, then GAT Beer would end up with a 4.5/5, which is... well, it's higher than any other craft beer store I've been to this year. Not gonna lie, folks, this is the biggest late-game curveball I could possibly imagine thrown at me on Day 313, that my fears of not being able to find decent beer in the NEast were for nothing. GAT Beer has completely put me at ease in at least one respect during this topsy-turvy month in my life.

So we will be featuring beers from that six-pack over the next six days, and confirm for once and for all that GAT Beer is the real deal. I only say that because it's a real possibility that this is a mirage and every beer I bought is a dud and expired or something and I never go back. I can say that today's 400 Pound Monkey—an English IPA with high levels of toffee-flavored malt and not much carbonation at all—makes it 1/1. A good beer, even though Pam didn't like it and had me drink her half of the bottle. Maybe I just like all English beers, I dunno... but now I'm getting off track.

Main point: I will more than likely be headed back to GAT Beer soon.

NOTES
 

BEER: 400 Pound Monkey

STYLE: English IPA

ABV: 6.8%

BREWED BY: Left Hand Brewing Company

LOCATION: Longmont, Colorado

PURCHASED AT: GAT Beer

PAIRED WITH: Garlic spaghetti squash

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

 

BEER COUNT: 471.5